I took an interest a while back in “tightly bound systems”. I forget why. Gregory Bateson may have talked about them. I bought a few books I never read, but did scan.
The gist of the idea is that inflexible systems tend to create accidents of their own, even if the goal of the system is to avoid accidents. There is really no substitute for intelligent, case based, human judgement. Someone, somewhere, possessed of common sense and goodwill, needs to ask “does what we are doing make sense? Is it accomplishing what we set out to accomplish?”
When the whiff of this disease starting floating in Corporate America, they started worrying about lawsuits. They gravitated towards a “zero defect” mentality. So did most governments.
And systems, once they acquire a momentum of their own, develop their own logic, their own inertia. The goal becomes the persistence of the system, not the solution of the actual originating problem.
What is obvious is that the “zero defect” mentality, which seeks to use government to win a pissing contest with the disease, such that it eventually disappears, regardless of the cost, is going to cost many, many more lives than are being saved. The logic is lunacy. The system is perverse, inverted, ugly.
Somewhere in here sane, intelligent people need to do the obvious cost/benefit analysis and make the obvious and only defensible decision, which is generalized reopening at a rapid pace. Anything else will be generating needless and painful death.
To be sure, the Democrats clearly seem to be willing to sacrifice tens and even hundreds of thousands of people to pursue their political objectives, but that degree of psychopathy only truly exists at the core, in people like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. Everyone else needs to wake the fuck up.